I moved back to my usual video-editing software, CyberLink PowerDirector, to stitch the footage together.

The result was a nice collection of screaming. I especially enjoyed ending with the prolonged Sound of Ultimate Suffering from The Princess Bride. This was another great exercise for looking at commonality and tropes throughout film.

I enjoy finding patterns and commonality in movies, so I chose to explore common tropes with this assignment. I chose to use the Reluctant Hero trope (one that is becoming especially common with the popularity of superhero films). The characters I selected included Dr. Strange, Ripley from Aliens, Moses from The Prince of Egypt, Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings, and Wolverine from X-Men. I grabbed the clips for each of these characters using File2HD.

I experimented with iMovie, selecting 1 second clips (which I felt conveyed the hero’s reluctance) and stitching them together. The result is a fast paced demonstration of the similarities and diversities among protagonists. In some ways it reminded me of the alignment chart which has become increasingly popular on the Internet as a way to categorize characters. Both involve teasing out an analysis of what characters have in common with others.

I always enjoy the mashup video projects, so I decided to try the classical mashup assignment. I chose Sia’s new music video The Greatest as my visual content. Since the tone of the videos is more dire (as it is a tribute to the Orlando victims) I chose to use a more dramatic classical piece, Oh Fortuna(which also had a similar length of time). I downloaded the entirety of the Sia video using File2HD.

I then removed the audio of the Sia video in iMovie and layered the audio from Oh Fortuna. The result was surprisingly good. Many of the musical hits match with visual elements in a very complimentary fashion. I uploaded the video to YouTube, but I’m not certain if the video is playable in the United States (due to the automatic detection of Sia’s visual content), but it appears to be available in Australia if one uses the Hola chrome plugin.